


through the air and winding snow

by sassafrasx



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Kiss, Friendship/Love, M/M, Mythic Heroes on Epic Quests for Love, Quests, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Underworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:56:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5472086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassafrasx/pseuds/sassafrasx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Athelstan is in pain, if he does not have the afterlife he deserves, Ragnar will follow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	through the air and winding snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cartographies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/gifts).



> Happiest yuletide, cartographies! I absolutely adored your Vikings prompts and I sincerely hope you enjoy what I've done with them <3
> 
> Infinite thanks to C, as always, who is the world's best sounding board I could ask for.

Aslaug wakes with a gasp.

“Athelstan,” she whispers from her side of the bed, and Ragnar blinks awake immediately, blood on fire. “He’s lost. Hel has taken him and he wanders alone.”

—

Ragnar laid Athelstan to rest with the Christian rights. He respected him too much to have done anything else — if Athelstan found peace in returning to his God, then how could Ragnar not ensure his friend the passage unto Heaven he so desired?

But the Gods— Oh, the _Gods_ , they have no such respect. And Ragnar, he won’t stand for it.

If Athelstan is in pain, if he does not have the afterlife he deserves, Ragnar will follow.

—

“What will you do?” Aslaug asks, voice heavy with worry, as Ragnar quickly throws together a small pack of supplies. “Where am I supposed to say you’ve gone?”

“There is a passage, to the east, in the mountains. There’s a secret entrance there, unprotected and unwatched.” He pauses, quirks his mouth a bit. “A wanderer told me once, if I had need of it. As for what you tell the others—” He waves a hand dismissively and continues preparing for his journey. “I don’t care what you tell them. I’ll be back before we raid.”

“He is _in Hel_ and Hel does not let anyone leave her realm,” Aslaug hisses. “You’re still mortal last I checked, Ragnar Lothbrok. Athelstan’s fate is sealed.”

Ragnar throws his pack over his shoulder with a scowl. “He is my _friend_. I won’t leave him to such a cruel fate. I can’t.”

—

Niflheim is cold, the ground packed hard beneath his feet. But Hel is near and Ragnar walks for days that feel like years, no sun setting or rising, grey continuing out in every direction for eternity.

His legs are like lead and time passes both too quickly and too slowly, dripping through his fingers. He thinks about resting in the soft-looking snow he passes, and carving out a place to warm himself, let his body recuperate. Maybe even sleep, but only for a short nap.

He keeps walking.

—

The wall of ice towers above him and his toes are worn and bitten raw through his boots. Ragnar has never been so cold.

With as many rags as he can tear wrapped around his hands he climbs anyway; he climbs until his blood is frozen quick in his bones, and his fingernails have chipped to bloody, torn edges — not that he can feel them anymore. The crevices in the blocks of ice flay at his fingers and toes, but still he stuffs them in, the dull numbness making him clumsy; yet no matter how far he goes the top of the wall never seems any closer. He climbs and climbs and climbs. And in the distant part of his mind that’s still working, he curses the Gods for their cruelty — and Athelstan’s God in particular for abandoning him to this fate.

—

The other side is flat and even more desolate, grey-white nothingness continuing on for miles, centuries. Eternity.

Spirits wander everywhere, to and fro, but give him a wide berth. Those who do look up and catch his eye are lost and vacant, their eyes as cruelly limitless as the world in which they inhabit. He saw others in Niflheim, watching him curiously at a distance half-hidden in the trees, a flickering hint of fire and shelter somewhere beyond. It had been nothing like— like _this_.

—

Ragnar wonders now if he will become one of them, lost to eternity, fathomless blue eyes that will never again truly see.

—

And then there is Athelstan, huddled and ragged in the snow. A beacon.

—

“I don’t understand,” Athelstan whispers, eyes wide and desperate and so, so precious. More precious than any treasure Ragnar has ever owned.

“Your God has forsaken you, my friend. And my Gods have sent you here, to wander with disgrace far from Valhalla and the feasts you deserve.” Ragnar’s voice scrapes in his throat, harsh and unused. (How long has he been searching? How many endless days have passed in this place?) He blinks back wetness in dry eyes and wonders once again at Athelstan’s face, years chiselled into his features from the soft monk he had dragged back from the shores of Lindisfarne. A beautiful face, dear and true.

Athelstan seems to shock and he grabs desperately at Ragnar’s arms. “Have you died?” he demands, voice growing stronger with the second, a spark of determination in weary, confused eyes.

“No. No, my friend. I’ve come to find you, to bring you back where you belong. At my side. If your God won’t have you, I will,” he murmurs and pulls their foreheads together, grips Athelstan’s arms back tight.

Athelstan chokes out a laugh. “Are you mad?”

“I’ve been told that many times, somehow. I don’t know why,” he says and pulls back, wry.

—

The road ahead is lighter this time, free and giddy, if just as interminable.

—

A woman waits for them, not far, her skin mottled with blue, face fierce and wretched and so imposing for all she seems to lounge in the bleak desolation.

“Hel,” Ragnar greets, clipped, wariness threading through his skin, prickled alert.

She nods once and flicks her gaze across him with calculation. “Ragnar Lothbrok, favorite of Odin. For now, anyway.” She tilts her head. “No spirit once sent here is allowed to leave this land.”

Her voice is heavy and bottomless and brooks no argument. Ragnar argues. “He shouldn’t be here.”

“And what would you know of it, human. You see nothing, you know nothing.”

Ragnar seethes. “He made peace with his God! He should never have been banished here.”

Faster than he can comprehend she looms over him, taking up more space than should be possible, speckled blue crowding out the grey sky. “He made peace with his God, but we did not make peace with him,” she growls, a rumble that rolls through the air itself and sets thunder in the ground.

“He doesn’t deserve this,” he says, voice quiet. She doesn’t even deem that worthy of response, icy eyes flinty and impassive. “What do you want in return? With this man by my side, I will conquer Paris, a city so full like my people have never seen! I will keep raiding and pushing, farther and farther, until my people have fertile soil and knowledge of every distant land we can find. Surely there is something out there you want in these new lands?”

Her eyes narrow. Then she purses her lips and takes a thoughtful step back.

“Perhaps.” She pulls the snow up around her, shimmery wisps threading through her legs and around her shoulders, and settles into her self-made throne which glints even in the dull light. “There are other Gods in these lands? Like his?” She scoffs and flicks her fingers at Athelstan.

Athelstan glances at Ragnar and licks his lips. “Well, yes, there have been many Gods to the west and the south.”

She sits up a little. “The price of your friend, Ragnar Lothbrok, is the spirit of one of these lesser Gods. You will kill one, and bring them back to me. That is the only thing I will accept, nothing less.”

“You want him _to kill a God_?” Athelstan whispers next to him in disbelief.

“Your Gods are weak like your peoples, grown fat off the land with easy lives. We cannot wander so far or we’d kill them ourselves, but surely _Ragnar Lothbrok_ can figure something out?” she says with a smirk.

Ragnar grins a vicious sort of grin and thinks, _Yes_.

“Good.” She nods firmly and waves at them in dismissal. “And you may leave that way, you stupid, stubborn man.” She points off to the side and a neat little pathway appears in the snow out of nowhere, with a bridge in the near distance.

Ragnar and Athelstan have only made it a short distance, before her voice slashes across them like shards of ice. “And Ragnar? You have a year, no more. If you don’t bring me a God, I will find your friend and drag him back here to a fate much worse than the one he has now,” she thunders and just like that, she is gone.

—

“I keep thinking I should tell you not to look back,” Athelstan says, a small, private smile at his lips as he glances at the ground. They’ve made it to a stream in the mountains, weather mild and pleasant, and Ragnar enjoys the moment, the quiet solitude, his wounds and blisters nearly faded into nothingness the farther they leave Hel behind. Time moves again.

“And why is that?” Ragnar grins.

“There’s an ancient tale I read once in Latin, of a man who traveled to the Underworld in grief for his wife, and he played his lyre so beautifully even the Gods were moved. But he was told that he couldn’t look back at her before he made it out of the Underworld or he would lose her forever.” Athelstan gazes unseeing into the distance and continues, murmuring, “ _Tunc primum lacrimis victarum carmine fama est Eumenidum maduisse genas, nec regia coniunx sustinet oranti nec, qui regit ima, negare, Eurydicenque vocant_.”

Ragnar watches the way his mouth forms the words, enraptured by the slip and shape and intonation on Athelstan’s lips. Athelstan peers up at Ragnar through his eyelashes and says, “Then they say, for the first time, the faces of the Furies were wet with tears, won over by his song: the king of the deep, and his royal bride, could not bear to refuse his prayer, and called for Eurydice.”

Ragnar hums with avid interest and leans closer, mind reveling at having Athelstan’s stories, his voice, back once again. “And how does their story end?”

“Orpheus became afraid when he could no longer hear Eurydice behind him and glanced back and she was taken away,” Athelstan says and frowns, looking away.

Ragnar stops and turns Athelstan towards him and searches his face. “Our story will not have the same ending. People will tell of our might throughout the ages,” Ragnar says fiercely with a shake of Athelstan’s arm.

Athelstan flicks his eyes over Ragnar’s, serious, brow furrowed. “Why? Why did you come for me— Make this mad agreement? _Why?_ ”

“Because you, my friend, are more dear to me than any other,” Ragnar says and grips Athelstan’s face in his hands, moving in until he can see nothing but Athelstan’s eyes in his own. “If you suffer, I suffer. I will _never_ allow you to endure such a fate.” And he kisses Athelstan, marvels at chapped lips that gasp softly on his and caress him so sweetly, a slow trickle of honey on his tongue.

Athelstan pulls back and holds Ragnar’s gaze. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, to— everything. Let’s conquer Paris, the world. Let’s kill ourselves a God.”

Ragnar grins wolfishly, slinging an arm around Athelstan’s waist as they continue on, and laughs with joy.

**Author's Note:**

> Latin quote from Ovid's Orpheus and Eurydice, translation used from here: http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph10.htm#484521418


End file.
